Giovanni Frazzetto

The brain thinks, the poem feels

Joy Guilt Anger Love: What Neuroscience Can—and Can’t—Tell Us About How We Feel by Giovanni Frazzetto (Penguin Books, $16).

Giovanni Frazzeto, a respected Italian neuroscientist and founding member of the European Neuroscience and Society Network, is as interested as anyone can be in what neuroscience can tell us about our emotional life.

But he doesn’t think that’s going to answer all our questions.

In this wide-ranging book, Frazzetto points to the range and power of emotion as experienced by humanity—using examples that include Dante, Caravaggio, and Bertolt Brecht, among others—as reason to be skeptical of any interpretation of science that points directly from one spot in the brain to a particular feeling.

He’s got an argument based in a holistic view of human emotions; quite simply, our feelings are determined as much by cultural cues about how we ought to feel as they are by neurology. What he’s writing about (and of course making seem obvious, by virtue of his writing skill) is the complex nature of emotions and the way that they interplay, not just with neurology, but also with our environment, our history, and the social structures in which we have lived over time.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a great deal about our emotions from neuroscience. It simply means that the organ of origination is only part of the discussion. For the full picture, we’ll need to turn to our own lives—and perhaps to poetry.… (mehr)